Bicoastal Marmoset Breeding Center

Abstract/Summary The common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) has experienced unprecedented growth in research across the United States and is rapidly emerging as a likely keystone biomedical model system in the next chapter of scientific discovery. Over the past decade, the number of marmoset laboratories in the US has more than quadrupled. There are now over 50 Principal Investigators who use marmoset as the model system in their research. Neuroscience is the primary engine driving marmoset research today, as nearly three quarters of marmoset researchers in the US use this model species to examine molecular, systems or cognitive functions in normal and diseased brains. In the past few years, there has also been rapid progress in generating genetically modified marmoset for disease models. In 2020, we established the Bicoastal Marmoset Breeding Center with two breeding colonies, one on the East Coast at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the other on the West Coast at University of California at San Diego (UCSD), to supply wild type marmosets to the research community. Because of the non-availability of air transport of NHP in U.S. and prohibitively expensive ground transportation of NHP between the east and west coast, these two breeding colonies are strategically located to support the marmoset community in regions near each colony. In this application, we propose to expand the mission of the Bicoastal Marmoset Breeding Center to increase the production of wild type marmosets to the US research community as demand likewise increases and to breed genetically modified marmosets that are produced by several NIH-funded projects and distribute these disease-model animals to investigators for their research needs. In addition, we propose to establish methods for behavioral phenotyping of both wild type and genetically modified marmosets in their social housing environment and make these methods available for the marmoset research community.